With the advance of network technology, various applications have been proposed for making a call between communications equipment connected to each other through a network.
Digital equipment tends to have high functionality with the development of highly-functional processing devices and software technology. Accordingly, a digital television display also tends to have various functions built therein. Such various functions enable the digital television display to acquire television program information from communications equipment connected to the digital television display through a network, for example. Furthermore, a function to make a call to another communications equipment connected through the network is proposed for the digital television display. To cause the digital television display to make a call to another communications equipment, incoming call control is needed.
For a telephone apparatus using a telephone communications line, various techniques have been proposed to carry out control according to a telephone caller upon arrival of an incoming call from the caller.
However, it is difficult to apply conventional control techniques used for telephone apparatuses to the digital television display because a number of people share the digital television display.